After graduating first in her class at Wayne State University’s law school, Patricia Boyle went door-to-door of law firms across downtown Detroit in search of a job, her son said Thursday.

Except no one would hire her. It was 1963.

“She could not find a job at the time because she was a woman,” said Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Jason Pernick, Boyle’s son. At the time, “...law firms would not hire woman.”

Boyle, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice, died Monday while visiting her sister in Ft. Meyers, Florida. She was hospitalized for pneumonia Sunday which lead to respiratory failure, Pernick said. She was 76.

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Boyle’s initial shortcomings did not deter the Detroit native. A dedicated public servant with an emphatic passion for the law, Pernick said she was eventually hired as a clerk for a federal judge in Detroit.

The county’s assistant prosecutor said Boyle was offering advice to him as recently as Saturday.

Pernick was writing a brief related to an opinion Boyle authored in the 1990s, a “very difficult and important area of the law,” he said. The two were texting back-and-forth about the issue — when evidence of “similar acts” can be used to prove something in a criminal case — throughout the day.

“Her legal scholarship continues to influence us today in the legal community, even after she’s been retired for more than 10 years,” Pernick said.

Pernick’s relationship with Boyle as a mother and a legal scholar was “inseparable,” he said.

The two sides of “Patty Boyle” involved a woman “that was my mother,” Pernick said, and “the legal giant in Michigan, a person who ... probably was the finest appellate judge to be produced in the state of Michigan.”

After her initial clerkship, Boyle worked as assistant United States Attorney until 1970. She served as the director of research training and appeals of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office from 1971 until 1976, when she was appointed to the Recorders’ Court in Detroit by then Gov. William Milliken.

Her decision in the years that followed amounted to a “head-scratcher” in the legal community, Pernick said. In 1978, then-President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit.

The lifetime federal appointment is regarded as a sort-of dream job in the legal community, Pernick said, because “you never have to run for election, never have to worry about if you’ll have a job next year.”

And, after five years, Boyle stepped down.

In 1983, she was appointed by former Gov. James Blanchard to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Pernick said lawyers today still ask, “Why, or how, could she give up a lifetime appointment to the federal bench?”

Boyle told her son it was a simple decision.

“It was easy for her,” Pernick said “because she said as a supreme court justice, she could do more for people in the state of Michigan than she could do as a federal judge.”

Boyle held the post for 15 years and retired in 1998.

While serving on the state’s highest court, Boyle was being considered for U.S. Attorney General under former President Bill Clinton’s administration. Her name was also tossed around as a possible U.S. Supreme Court appointment.

“I think she would’ve reluctantly gone to Washington,” Pernick said. “... Perhaps she would’ve done it as a supreme court justice but not as the attorney general.”

Pernick said he recently discovered a written speech Boyle delivered in 2010 to scholars of the Detroit College Promise, a non-profit that offers universal scholarships for Detroit Public Schools students to Michigan colleges.

“I had not seen that before,” he said. “...There was a lot of new stuff in there for me.”

In the speech, Boyle described the difficult upbringing she had growing up inside an upper flat on Tuller Street on Detroit’s west side. Her father sold fuller brushes until he landed a job in the supply department at Ford Motor company.

Boyle’s mother, she said in the speech, had an experience not unlike her own after graduating from Wayne State.

“My mom had a job in a bank until the bank decided that it was more important that men had jobs than women,” she said.

“They let all the women go.”

With the help of a government scholarship, student loans, food stamps to support three of her children, born while attending law school, Boyle attended day and night school to finish her class load.

“I drove to night school in an old green Ford which had so much rust on the floor you could see the pavement from the passenger seat,” she said.

Boyle recently sold her home in White Lake, Pernick said. She was temporarily living in Howell and planned to move to an apartment in Commerce Township, to be closer to her son.

Boyle is survived by her four children, five grandchildren and her sister, Linda Gillespie.

Visitation is schedule for 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Lynch & Sons Funeral Home at 404 E. Liberty in Milford.

A funeral service is planned for 1 p.m. Sunday at Milford Presbyterian Church at 238 N. Main Street, with family and friends gathering at noon. The burial will be at Commerce Memorial Cemetery.

About the Author

Ryan Felton is a staff writer at The Oakland Press who covers Rochester, Rochester Hills, Oakland Township, transportation and technology. Blogging about Detroit at detroit.jalopnik.com. Reach the author at ryan.felton@oakpress.com
or follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryanfelton13.